New from Cambridge University Press!

Edited By Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt

This book "fills the unquestionable need for a comprehensive and up-to-date handbook on the fast-developing field of pragmatics" and "includes contributions from many of the principal figures in a wide variety of fields of pragmatic research as well as some up-and-coming pragmatists."

Book Information

This volume provides a detailed and explicit account of the genre of social science research articles. While previous literature has analyzed some aspects of the research genre separately, this book presents a comprehensive model which characterizes the generic, registerial and discoursal options as they interweave within a text.Another important contribution of the analysis is the formulation of explicit realisation statements that relate the abstract categories of move and act (as described by Swales and Bhatia) to the way these units actually are created by lexical grammatical choices. The realisation networks draw on the work of systemic functional linguistics, primarily Halliday, Hasan, Martin and Ventola. The added emphasis in this study is that research texts are ultimately persuasive texts and genre 'constraints' can be tightened or loosened in response to the rhetorical dimension. The description of the social science research genre is important both for those teachingEnglish, for speakers and readers of other languages, and for researchers of discourse structure. For teachers, the detailed analysis of texts and the method for determining realization rules will help in guiding students who must understand and produce research articles. For researchers, the qualitative and quantitative analysis show how the different levels of abstraction, from the genre itself to its moves, acts and wordings, are related to each other. Lastly, this analysis can serve as a model for future descriptions of other academic and professional genres.